


Requisite

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Male-Female Friendship, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-05 03:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15855078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: “She’s fine after everything. After Dick Coonan.”





	Requisite

**Author's Note:**

> Set after Sucker Punch (2 x 13). Thing A Month for August. 

 

She’s fine after everything. After Dick Coonan.

No one asks. Not head-on, anyway. They’re cops, and they don’t. Esposito, Montgomery, even Ryan. They’re cops, and asking isn’t how things go.

Lanie doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t, either. Castle. For all the million things he pesters her about now that she’s a mostly captive audience, he never once asks how she’s doing. Not really, but if he did—if any one of them came out with it—she’d say she’s fine, and it would be true.

It would be approximately true.

She’s on desk duty, and that sucks. It would suck under any circumstances, but now—in a post–Dick Coonan world—it especially sucks, because of all the time it leaves on her hands.

It feels almost literal. Time on her hands she has to find a use for, so she does. She types. She files. She organizes and reorganizes. She catches up and gets ahead. She tells herself she’s getting ahead, anyway, though really, every single thing is one she’ll have to do all over again when the time comes—when she needs the paperwork or she realizes that her brilliant new filing system makes everything impossible—because that _is_ how things go when you’re a cop.

But she does it anyway. Busywork. She keeps her hands moving and the time falls away. She keeps her head out of it entirely. Almost entirely.

It’s not that hard, which is weird. Or she thinks it should be weird, how easy it is to keep her head out of it.But the truth of it is Dick Coonan is dead. The man who ended her mother’s life met his own end at her hand, and it is—it remains—a strangely simple fact.

Because her mother’s death wasn’t a random, wayward event. Because Dick Coonan didn’t hate or fear or want anything from Johanna Beckett. Because he did it for money, and circumstances of his own making dictated that he’d die giving up nothing more than that.

That sucks, too. Obviously it does, but still, she knows more than she did when he walked in the world. When he wielded power and commanded respect. When he hid behind money and that wholly unremarkable face of his.

She knows more now than she did before Dick Coonan bled out beneath her hands, and she’s fine.

 

* * *

“But how long _could_ it last?” He’s making a paper clip chain. A rainbow paper clip chain. “I got them out of Ryan’s desk,” he’s quick to tell her when finally catches the look she’s giving him. “I’ve learned my lesson about fishing around in your drawers.” 

“I doubt that.” She smirks, enjoying the theater as he rubs at the knuckles she’s had at least a dozen occasions to smack on the days he’s dropped in.

It hasn’t been every day. It hasn’t been every other, necessarily, though some have been back-to-back. The pattern, if there is one, is something in between, and she wonders if there’s some calculus to it or it’s just the rhythms of his boredom.

She’s grateful, either way, to be honest. For the petty annoyance of him undoing whatever she’s just done. For the idle chatter he keeps up that’s not quite one-sided, because he wants procedural details. He asks _what if_ questions about Montgomery’s role and jots down the title of every suit tromping in and out of the precinct. Every stone-faced functionary moving her ever closer to clear for duty. He takes some of the time off her hands, and he doesn’t try to get into her head.

“I mean, it couldn’t be, like, _a month_ , could it?”

He looks aghast. Comically horrified, and it pulls her right in. She stops whatever it was she was doing. Arranging the perfectly sharpened pencils by height in their cup, or centering the already precisely centered blotter. She stops for once. 

“What if it were a whole month?” She plants her elbows on the desk and leans toward him. “What’s the matter, Castle? Afraid you’d run out of things to fiddle with?”

“Behind your desk, Detective?” One eyebrow climbs high. He twirls the end of his paperclip chain like Mae West with a feather boa. “A month wouldn’t put a dent my fiddling.”

She laughs. It’s not the first time he’s managed that since Dick Coonan. Not at all, but she feels this one in her ribs. She feels it tugging her back the other way when she tries rein it in, and she thinks again that she’s fine. That everything is fine.

“A month?”

They turn in perfect sync to find Montgomery standing just beyond her color-coordinated row of file folders with their edges perfectly squared. Standing close enough that he’s probably been there a while, and she feels heat spreading up the back of her neck. She feels it rounding over the tips of her ears when she catches Castle’s wide, anything-but-innocent grin out of the corner of her eye.

“Sir—” she starts in on something that might have turned into an apology. For what, she’s not sure, but it doesn’t matter anyway. Montgomery rolls right over her.

“You think I can afford to have my best detective pushing paper for a whole month, Castle?” His face is blank and serious, but it’s a cover. He’s grinning, too, right underneath.

“You have news?” Her stomach stirs with excitement. With relief.

“Good news, Beckett.” He lets the smile break through.“One last hurdle, then you’re back out there catching bad guys.”

He produces something from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. A small white cardthat he slaps down on the desk between the two of them with a flourish.

“Back out there,” she echoes.

She’s frozen for an instant. For half of one, then she’s palming it smoothly from the polished surface right into her own pocket.

“Thank you, sir,” she calls out, too loudly, after the Captain, but he’s already gone.

It’s just the two of them and sudden silence, leaden between them.

“Psychologist.” He says it slowly, almost like he’s sounding it out. “Oh.”

“Standard,” she says, her shoulders bobbing in something that’s meant to be a shrug.

“Of course.” He stares down at his knuckles, whitening as they clench the paperclip chain sagging across his knees. “Yeah. Of course.”

He flicks a glance sideways at her. His breath hitches once, twice, three times like he’s not sure what to say. Like he’s not sure what _not_ to say, and she knows she should throw him some kind of lifeline.

He’s been there not quite every day through this. He’s made her laugh and stuck to the practical with all his prying and poking and prodding for the mechanics of this. Her life in a world after Dick Coonan. He’s steered clear of whatever wounds might still be healing just beneath the surface. He’s been there in a way she wouldn’t have counted on before, and she really should say something.

She should, but he gets there first.

“That’s . . . good, right?” His voice is low. Tentative, but there’s a strange sense of something cracking, even so. A strange sense of something giving way, and she’s not ready for it. “I mean, considering, it’s—“

“It’s fine, ok?” She’s going for brusque, but it comes out well past that. It comes out sharp, but she can’t stop herself. “It’s no big deal.” 

He blinks once. He takes the cue straight from her. 

“Fine,” he says. “No big deal.” 

It’s an echo that improves on the original. It sounds true.

It sounds approximately true.

* * *

“This is harder than I remember.” 

Kate draws a long, shuddering breath. She feels heavy, and the high-backed chair presses hard into every vertebrae and knob of bone in her shoulders. Her hips.

If she were any less exhausted, she’d probably be appalled that she’s just admitted to being in therapy before. Her mind would probably be racing, wondering how to knock down the obstacle she’s managed to throw down right in front of herself. But she _is_ exhausted.

“You did fine, Detective.”

Dr. Eppson smooths the blank top sheet of her legal pad over the notes she’s taken—some, but not many Kate thinks. She hopes. Unless not taking notes is bad. 

“Fine,” she hears herself echo. It’s all a little out of body. “I don’t feel fine.” She _is_ appalled at that—at the admission—and it must show.

Eppson doesn’t laugh. She’s much lower key than that, but the corner of her mouth quirks up. “I’d be more concerned if you did.” 

“More concerned.” Her fingernails dig into her palms, exhaustion notwithstanding. “So you’re . . . concerned?”

Her gaze falls heavy on the pad resting across the psychologist’s thighs. She tamps down an absurd vision of snatching it up and heading for the exits.

“I’ve been at this a long time, Detective,” she says. It’s matter of fact, but Kate sees the truth of it pass over the woman’s face. “It’s a profound thing to take a life. It _should_ be, and I’m always concerned for and about the cops who sit in that chair.”

“A life.” Kate’s palms turn upward unbidden. She stares down at them, and there’s a world-tilting instant where she sees them dark with blood. She feels the unyielding expanse of ribs beneath the heel of her hand. “Not just any life.”

She snaps back into herself as she says it. She blinks, reorienting in the soft light of the lamp at her elbow and dusk slanting through the blinds. The office hush is so absolute, it’s almost like waking.

“Yes and no,” Eppson says. “From the perspective of our work here,” she covers the blank top sheet of the legal pad with her hand, “this is a life taken in the line of duty.”

“It is.” The two syllables seem thin and too much at the same time. They come slowly and feel like the hardest work yet. “There wasn’t . . . there was no other option.”

“That’s what the investigative team concluded.” The psychologist’s gaze flicks to a file on the side table next to her. “That’s what your Captain and colleagues concluded.” 

“And that’s what I’m supposed to conclude?” She half laughs at the air quotes that come out around the last word. “It’s true. I think it’s true.” She nods, more to herself than anything. “Isn’t that good enough?”

“Thinking it’s true is a solid start.”

The emphasis falls on the first word, and Kate wonders what comes next. She wonders what else there is, but some part of her seems to have an idea already. “Knowing comes next?” There’s a definite question mark, but the idea is there. It’s been there the whole time, lurking around the corner of approximately true.

“Knowing.” The doctor considers it. She gives a mild shake of her head. “Feeling, maybe. Knowing is often a long time in coming.”

Kate feels the weight of that settle on her shoulders, but she feels something breaking up inside her, too. She draws in a breath and the spaces between her ribs feel habitable in way they haven’t since Castle’s hand came to rest on her shoulder. She feels the life of a man slip loose from the life of Dick Coonan.“And in the meantime?”

“In the mean time, you’re doing fine.”

* * *

She heads home after the session. That’s her intention, anyway, as her mind spins and she distantly decides that she’s too exhausted even for food. She heads home, thinking about climbing right into bed without even taking her shoes off, but that’s not where she winds up. 

“Castle?” She snaps back into her own body for the second time in as many hours, but there’s no soft light this time. There’s no hush. 

“Beckett.” He freezes, hunched over her desk, absolutely in the middle of something. “You’re here.” 

“Here,” she repeats blankly. She’s surprised—utterly surprised—to find that means the precinct. “Yeah. I need . . . ” She gives herself a mental shake and something close to true drops into place. “I need to get my desk back in order.” 

“ _Back_ in order?” His gaze takes in the blotter, the squared edges of the folders, the pencils in ascending order of height.

“Back,” she insists. She arrives at the desk, her eyes narrowing as he hunches further over whatever it is he’s doing. “ _You’re_ here.”

“It’s not a big deal,” he blurts. His hands are cupped around something dead center on the blotter. The corner of a yellow post-it pokes out beyond his sleeve and one of his ridiculously fancy pens is still rolling from side to side. “I just . . . it went ok?”

His mouth snaps shut. He looks utterly shamefaced, and she’s too tired to ask how he even knows. She’s too tired to make him squirm, more's the pity. 

“It went ok,” she says simply. 

“Good,” he responds in kind, and just like that, they take their places. He steps back and holds her chair as she settled into it. He drops into his own, and the mystery is revealed. Most of it is, anyway. The note is gone. So is the pen, but she lets it go. She takes in what’s left?

“A cupcake?” She prods the cellophane container with one finger.

“It’s not a good one,” he says quickly.“It’s not a _bad_ one.”The blush he’s already working on gets deeper. “I just mean. It’s a cupcake. It’s not a big deal.”

“Chocolate, though.” Her thumbs find the corners of the clamshell case. The top pops and she finds she’s suddenly ravenous. She swipes a fingerful of frosting. Her eyes flutter closed as it melts on her tongue.

“Of course it’s chocolate.”

He looks at her like she’s crazy. Like anything else would be crazy,and it’s a little bit over the top. He’s going for a laugh and most of her is inclined to follow right along. Most of her, but not all.

“Will Nikki have to go?”

She stuffs a bite of cupcake in her mouth, but it’s too late. The question is already out there.

“To therapy? I think so.” It’s a mixture of an answer. Apology and defiance both. “I think she’ll have to.” He glances at her sideways, reading her and writing her, both at once. “It’ll go ok, though.”

“It will,” she says. She pushes the cupcake toward him. She watches with a sharp eye as he snatches a piece for himself. “It’ll be fine.”

It's true. She thinks it's true. 

**Author's Note:**

> This started with the cupcake and a single line from near the end of Naked Heat. It hadn't really struck me that Dick Coonan is the first person Castle sees Beckett shoot.


End file.
